ABSTRACTInspired by challenges we faced in an undergraduate community-literacy cohort, we theorize “epideictic listening” as an important concept for articulating the range of listening strategies necessary both for our work in local public schools and for sustaining the cohort’s internal cohesion. Through critical reflection, we (faculty and student coauthors) offer a definition of “epideictic listening” that draws from, but also distinguishes itself from, other theoretical frameworks, such as rhetorical listening and community listening. We situate epideictic listening within the larger rhetorical tradition of epideixis. We end with a concrete application for epideictic listening—the debrief—and gesture toward the larger significance for epideictic listening in community settings.KEYWORDS: Debriefepideictic listeningepideixisethosrhetorical listening Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Journalists contribute in many routine ways to public controversies, ways that are often overlooked in traditional criticism. They have tended to be overlooked in part because of the agonistic argument dialogue that functions as a tacit, a priori location for controversy, and in part because of the tendency of traditional critics to treat news texts as reflections of controversy rather than contributions to it. This essay examines in detail journalists' entextualization and recontextualization of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's discourse from a press conference on September 22, 1999 in order to explain one way that they contributed to the Brooklyn Museum controversy. The analysis adopts a constitutive attitude toward controversy, asking how our habits of talking and writing contribute to our impressions of a controversy as an autonomous cultural phenomenon.

Abstract This essay analyzes the web of persuasion named the “knowledge enthymeme”; in the public policy debate over mandatory newborn HIV testing in the United States and especially New York. Bringing together classical rhetorical theory and Foucault's theory of the knowledge‐power loop, the essay explains how the conceptual/argumentative frame of the knowledge enthymeme helped shape the knowledge‐power relations of mandatory newborn testing in dangerous ways. Ultimately, the knowledge enthymeme blocked more responsive approaches to testing by exaggerating the beneficial effects of testing and its knowledge, ignoring the contingenices of this knowledge, and bypassing the “situated knowledges “ of the women it targets.